Marianne Moore Quotes

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

The mind is an enchanting thing is an enchanted thing, like the glaze on a katydid-wing subdivided by sun till the nettings are legion.

The hands are the heart's messengers.

It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.

If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze.

Among animals, one has a sense of humor. Humor saves a few steps, it saves years.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.

... imaginary gardens with real toads in them ... ... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

Yule—Yul log for the Christmas-fire tale-spinner—of fairy tales that can come true: Yul Brynner.

When you take my time, you take something I had meant to use.

The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.

Originality is... a by-product of sincerity.

The prey of fear, he, always curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done, says to the alternating blaze, "Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul."

he who gives quickly gives twice / in nothing so much as in a letter.

The sweet air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish.

O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven-of silk-worm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!

The weak overcomes its/ menace, the strong over-/comes itself.

Conscious writing can be the death of poetry.

It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.

Below the incandescent stars / below the incandescent fruit, / the strange experience of beauty; / its existence is too much; / it tears one to pieces / and each fresh wave of consciousness / is poison.

[The] whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion.

[On her use of quotations:] When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing, is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber.

To wear the arctic fox you have to kill it.

The mind is an enchanting thing.

The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.

Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man.

As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust.

Hindered characters / seldom have mothers / in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

The power of the visible is the invisible.

We don't like flowers that do not wilt; they must die, and nine she-camel hairs aid memory.

The heart that gives, gathers.

I'm troubled. I'm dissatisfied. I'm Irish.

A man is a writer if all his words are strung in definite sentence sounds.

War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing. You can never tell with either how it will go.

Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.

Blessed the geniuses who know / that egomania is not a duty.

There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.

There never was a war that was not inward.

Which of us has not been stunned by the beauty of an animal's skin or its flexibility in motion?

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Superior people never make long visits.

I wonder what Adam and Eve think of it by this time.